Cloud content management company Box Inc. is adding yet more artificial intelligence capabilities to its platform, integrating its Box AI offering  Microsoft Corp.’s Azure OpenAI Service.

Announced today, the integration will enable OpenAI’s most advanced large language models to tap into the vast amounts of data that organizations store within Box Content Cloud. The announcement builds upon last year’s launch of Box AI, which introduced a suite of generative artificial intelligence capabilities within Box.

Box AI, which was in beta until today, is focused on helping users ask and answer questions about the information stored within Box Content Cloud. It also helps them tap the generative aspect of generative AI to create new content.

Generative AI has become all the rage ever since OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT took the internet by storm last year thanks to its ability to answer questions and generate content in a humanlike way. Since then, technology providers like Box have been racing to integrate the technology to improve enterprise productivity.

By integrating with Azure OpenAI, Box said it will be able to power various new workloads. For instance, financial services companies will be able to extract insights from detailed reports stored in Box, such as market trends, economic indicators and so on. They’ll simply be able to ask questions about their data, and OpenAI’s models will quickly summarize whatever it discovers.

Another interesting use case is life sciences, where generative AI can help to distill information and unearth insights from things like clinical trial data. Meanwhile, public sector agencies can tap generative AI to quickly summarize feedback from their constituents and policy research initiatives, in order to guide evidence-based decisions and policy development.

Other use cases include the insurance industry, where insurers can quickly find the key information they need to assess claims in a more efficient way, and in the legal industry, where it can help to identify relevant information within complex legal texts.

Such use cases can be extremely powerful, vastly improving worker efficiency, but the integration with Box and Azure OpenAI brings the added benefit of strict compliance with regulations such as FINRA, GxP and FedRAMP. According to Box, it means customers will benefit from Microsoft’s enterprise-grade standards around security, privacy, and compliance to this groundbreaking technology.

Box Chief Technology Officer Ben Kus said that despite all of the hype, generative AI is still a very new concept for most enterprises. But he insisted that customers are excited to apply the technology to their content in Box.

“Our collaboration with Microsoft spans well over a decade, and has spurred innovation throughout previous technology shifts, including cloud and mobile computing,” he said. “Now, in this new era of AI, we are expanding our collaboration again to bring AI to enterprises without compromising data security, privacy, compliance, and governance.”

Box AI generally available

Box AI is being integrated with Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI service at the same time as it finally becomes generally available, the company said. Until now, its suite of tools has only been available in beta test, but that hasn’t stopped thousands of customers from exploring what it can do.

Box revealed that some of its early adopters include wealth advisers, who are using Box AI to analyze investor relations documents to aid in their investment decisions, and product marketing managers, who are leveraging its capabilities to generate new content for emails, blog posts and social media updates.

The company said Box AI is generally available now for Enterprise Plus plan subscribers, with individual users having access to 20 queries per month and 2,000 additional queries available on a company level.

Today’s announcement builds on a longstanding partnership between Box and Microsoft that has resulted in numerous integrations over the years. Box Content Cloud integrates with Microsoft Teams, bringing the collaboration platform directly within Box’s platform and vice versa. It’s also integrated with the Microsoft 365 suite of office tools and Outlook, which is Microsoft’s email client platform.

In addition, Box said its platform will integrate with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 later this year.

Image: Box